jumping the gun AND the shark

I had a number of friends who gave birth in September and October of this year. Five friends, in fact, which is a lot for two months. It was neat to see the baby names pour in, and see what each friend chose (if interested, there was a Luke, a Weston, a Chase, a Thomas, a Talia, and, just recently, my cousin had a Grace). My older sister just posted this article on how to pick a baby name, and it’s fascinating. Plus it lead to many minutes of checking different names for their distribution across time (graphs! trends! hurray!). My parents named all three of us with #3-category names right when they were fads. I don’t know if they knew it was a fad and didn’t care, or realized it was a bandwagon later on… though they did manage to avoid the BIG fads of the late seventies/early eighties (no Jennifers among us).

Gem from this article:

“In 30 years, the names Natalie, Chelsea, Samantha, and Lindsay will sound how Nancy, Cheryl, Susan, and Linda do today. And in 60 years, the names Ethan, Cody, Brandon, and Matthew will be Earl, Chester, Bernard, and Melvin.”

Gem from my chat with my younger sister online last night about OPKs:

Me: I don’t get clear signals, which frustrates my sciency self. BUT it’s because I’m legitimately not ovulating, so the lack of signal is TRUE, it’s just not what I’m looking for.

Sister – ah, a biased sciency self

Me: no, just one that doesn’t like tests where you need one line to be DARKER than the other, not just present/absent. It’s like reading tea leaves.

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One thought on “jumping the gun AND the shark”

That article is really interesting. The website is brilliant too. I read her book when we were pregnant with E., and she had categorized names, so there would be an entire page of names I loved, and another entire page of names I hated. Made it clear that although I had lots of names I liked, they pretty much ALL fell into the category of “old fashioned, traditional but rarely used”.